Caracas Getting Continent's Biggest Mosque

By JAMES BROOKE,

Published: January 3, 1993

CARACAS, Venezuela—
Ever since 1498, when Spanish sailors planted a cross on a beach in a land they later called Little Venice, Roman Catholicism has been the dominant religion in Venezuela.

Now, against the emerald green shoulder of an Andean ridge, a slim white minaret rises 370 feet to a crown of a star and crescent. Mirroring modern Venezuela's religious tolerance and its oil realpolitik, artisans here are putting finishing touches on what will be the biggest mosque in Latin America. Rising higher than the Catholic Cathedral a few blocks away, the new minaret is the highest in the West.

"It is like a dream come true for us," Hassan Majzoub, president of Venezuela's Islamic Center, said of the four-year project, which is to culminate in March with the inauguration of the Caracas Islamic Center.

Mr. Majzoub, a shopkeeper who emigrated from Lebanon in 1968, acknowledged that the 100,000 Muslims in Venezuela were easily surpassed in number by Muslims in Argentina, Brazil and the United States.

But Venezuela, a founding member of OPEC, depends on oil sales for 80 percent of its Government income and is eager to maintain a good relationship with Saudi Arabia, the dominant OPEC power. When a Saudi Arabian foundation offered to pay for the $8.5 million mosque, Venezuela's Government jumped at the chance to exert religious diplomacy.

"The mosque represents not only our complete religious freedom, but also the excellent relations between Venezuela and Saudi Arabia," President Carlos Andres Perez, said in an interview.

The benefactor, the Ibrahim Bin Abdulaziz al-Ibrahim Foundation of the Suadi royal family, is building mosques in other cities not traditionally associated with Islam: Dusseldorf, Gibraltar, Milan and Moscow.

In this capital, the mosque's dome dominates one of the city's most visible and most prestigious addresses. Situated at the head of a main artery, Avenida Libertador, the mosque counts among its neighbors the national theater, fine arts museum, telephone company and botanical gardens.

For the architects, the price of prestige has been the challenge of squeezing onto an irregularly shaped one-acre lot a mosque capable of holding 3,500 worshipers. Leased by the Government, the lot is 40 feet above the tracks of the city's main subway line and cheek by jowl with an eight-lane freeway.

"We are competing with a highway overpass," Oscar Bracho, the Venezuelan architect, said recently as he walked through the construction site. "Then, underneath, we have the metro."

To muffle noise and vibration from the subway, the ground floor of the mosque will be devoted to a community room that will be used for weddings, meetings, a library and a Koranic school. To muffle highway noise, the inner octagonal sanctuary is encased, first in concrete and then in white Cuban marble. A 56-Foot Bronze Lamp

Affording a traditional play of light and shadows to the prayer hall, sunlight will filter through double-pane windows, and artificial light will emanate from a 56-foot hammered bronze lamp imported from Egypt.

Built to face Mecca, the new mosque echoes this Caribbean nation's relaxed ecumenical tolerance. In a neighborhood called Santa Rosa, or Holy Rose, Avenida Libertador now starts with a mosque, runs past a Catholic church, and ends with one of the city's major synagogues.

In front of the mosque is Peace Square, a small plaza that has a marble monolith with a bronze bas-relief depicting an Islamic Crescent, a Cedar of Lebanon and a Star of David.

Still, the ecumenical spirit in Venezuela, where more than 95 percent of the 20 million people are at least nominally Roman Catholic, is tinged with a dash of unfamiliarity.

Stuck in traffic, drivers on the highway have been known to roll down their windows and to ask artisans about progress on a building they refer to as the "Muslim church" or the "Muslim synagogue."